by Max Brooks
“Nice boy, Zhi Xiao, such a good boy.” He was still holding my hand when he closed his eyes forever.
Sydney, Australia
[Clearwater Memorial is the newest hospital to be constructed in Australia and the largest one built since the end of the war. Terry Knox’s room is on the seventeenth floor, the “Presidential Suite.” His luxurious surroundings and expensive, almost unobtainable medication are the least his government can do for the first and, to date, only Australian commander of the International Space Station. In his words, “Not bad for the son of an Andamooka opal miner.”
His withered body seems to liven during our conversation. His face regains some of its color.]
I wish some of the stories they tell about us were true. Makes us sound all the more heroic. [Smiles.] Truth is, we weren’t “stranded,” not in Terms of being suddenly or unexpectedly trapped up there. Nobody had a better view of what was happening than us. No one was surprised when the replacement crew from Baikonur failed to launch, or when Houston ordered us to pile into the X-38 for evacuation. I wish I could say that we violated orders or physically fought with one another over who should stay. What really happened was much more mundane and reasonable. I ordered the scientific team, and any other nonessential personnel, back to Earth, then gave the rest of the crew the choice to remain behind. With the X-38 reentry “lifeboat” gone, we would be technically stranded, but when you think of what was at stake then, I can’t imagine any of us wanting to leave.
The ISS is one of the greatest marvels of human engineering. We’re talking about an orbital platform so large it could be seen from Earth with the naked eye. It’d taken sixteen countries over ten years, a couple hundred space walks, and more money than anyone without job security would admit to finally complete her. What would it take to build another one, if another one could ever be built ?
Even more important than the station was the incalculable, and equally irreplaceable, value of our planet’s satellite network. Back then there were over three thousand in orbit, and humanity depended on them for everything from communications to navigation, from surveillance to something even as mundane yet vital as regular and reliable weather prediction. This network was as important to the modern world as roads had been in ancient times, or rail lines during the industrial age. What would happen to humanity if these all-important links just started dropping out of the sky?
Our plan was never to save them all. That was unrealistic and unnecessary. All we had to do was concentrate on the systems most vital to the war effort, just a few dozen birds that had to remain aloft. That alone was worth the risk of staying.
Were you ever promised a rescue?
No, and we didn’t expect it. The issue wasn’t how we were going to get back to Earth, it was how we could manage to stay alive up there. Even with all our tanked 02 and emergency perchlorate candles,” even with our water recycling system operating at peak capacity, we only had enough food for roughly twenty-seven months, and that was including the test animals in the lab modules. None of them were being used to test any kind of vaccines so their flesh was still edible. I can still hear their little shrieks, still see the spots of blood floating in micro gravity. Even up there, you couldn’t escape the blood. I tried to be scientific about it, calculating the nutritional value of every floating red globule I sucked out of the air. I kept insisting that it was all for the good of the mission and not my own ravenous hunger.
Tell me more about the mission. If you were trapped on the station, how did you manage to keep the satellites in orbit?
We used the “Jules Verne Three” ATV, the last supply pod launched before French Guyana was overrun. It was originally designed as a one-way vehicle, to be filled with trash after depositing its cargo, then sent back to Earth to burn up in the atmosphere. We modified it with manual flight controls and a pilot’s couch. I wish we could have fixed it with a proper viewport. Navigating by video wasn’t fun; neither was having to do my Extra Vehicular Activities, my space walks, in a reentry suit because there wasn’t room for a proper EVA kit.
Most of my excursions were to the ASTRO, which was basically just a petrol station in space. Satellites, the military, surveillance type, some-times have to change orbit in order to acquire new targets. They do that by firing their maneuvering thrusters and using up their small amount of hydrazine fuel. Before the war, the American military realized it was more cost-effective to have a refueling station already in orbit rather than sending up a lot of manned missions. That’s where ASTRO came in. We modified it to refuel some of the other satellites as well, the civilian models that need just the occasional top-off to boost back up from a decaying orbit. It was a marvelous machine: a real time-saver. We had a lot of technology like that. There was the “Canadarm,” the fifty-foot robotic inch-worm that performed necessary maintenance tasks along the station’s outer skin. There was “Boba,” the VR-operated robonaut we fitted with a thruster pack so he could work both around the station and away from it on a satellite. We also had a little squadron of PSAs, these free-floating robots, about the shape and size of a grapefruit. All of this wondrous technology was designed to make our jobs easier. I wish they hadn’t worked so well.
We had maybe an hour a day, maybe even two, where there was nothing to do. You could sleep, you could exercise, you could reread the same books, you could listen to Radio Free Earth or to the music we’d brought with us (over and over and over again). I don’t know how many times I listened to that Redgum song: “God help me, I was only nineteen.” It was my father’s favorite, reminded him of his time in Vietnam. I prayed that all that army training was helping to keep him and my mum alive now. I hadn’t heard anything from him, or anyone else in Oz since the government had relocated to Tasmania. I wanted to believe they were all right, but watching what was happening on Earth, as most of us did during our off-duty hours, made it almost impossible to have hope.
They say that during the cold war, American spy birds could read the copy of Pravda in a Soviet citizen’s hands. I’m not sure if that’s entirely true. I don’t know the tech specs of that generation of hardware. But I can tell you that these modern ones whose signals we pirated from their relay birds-these could show muscles tear and bones snap. You could read the lips of victims crying out for mercy, or the color of their eyes when they bulged with their last breath. You could see at what point red blood began to turn brown, and how it looked on gray London cement as opposed to white, Cape Cod sand.
We had no control over what the spy birds chose to observe. Their targets were determined by the U.S. military. We saw a lot of battles — Chongqing, Yonkers; we watched a company of Indian troops try to rescue civilians trapped in Ambedkar Stadium in Delhi, then become trapped themselves and retreat to Gandhi Park. I watched their commander form his men into a square, the kind the Limeys used in colonial days. It worked, at least for a little while. That was the only frustrating part about satellite surveillance; you could only watch, not listen. We didn’t know that the Indians were running out of ammunition, only that the Zed Heads were starting to close in. We saw a helo hover overhead and watched as the commander argued with his subordinates. We didn’t know it was General Raj-Singh, we didn’t even know who he was. Don’t listen to what the critics say about that man, about how he buggered off when things got too hot. We saw it all. He did try to put up a fight, and one of his blokes did smash him in the face with a rifle butt. He was out cold when they hauled him into that waiting chopper. It was a horrible feeling, seeing it all so close and yet unable to do anything.
We had our own observation gear, both the civilian research birds and the equipment right there on the station. The images they gave us weren’t half as powerful as the military versions, but they were still frighteningly clear. They gave us our first look at the mega swarms over central Asia and the American Great Plains. Those were truly massive, miles across, like the American buffalo must have once been.
We watched the evacuation of Japan and couldn
’t help but marvel at the scale. Hundreds of ships, thousands of small boats. We lost count of how many helicopters buzzed back and forth from the rooftops to the armada, or how many jetliners made their final run north to Kamchatka.
We were the first ones to discover zombie holes, the pits that the undead dig when they’re going after burrowing animals. At first we thought they were just isolated incidents until we noticed that they were spreading all over the world; sometimes more than one would appear in close proximity to the next. There was a field in southern England-I guess there must have been a high concentration of rabbits-that was just riddled with holes, all different depths and sizes. Many of them had large, dark stains around them. Although we couldn’t zoom in close enough, we were pretty sure it was blood. For me that was the most terrifying example of our enemy’s drive. They displayed no conscious thought, just sheer biological instinct. I once watched a Zed Head go after something, probably a golden mole, in the Namib Desert. The mole had burrowed deep in the slope of a dune. As the ghoul tried to go after it, the sand kept pouring down and filling the hole. The ghoul didn’t stop, didn’t react in any way, it just kept going. I watched it for five days, the fuzzy image of this G digging, and digging, and digging, then suddenly one morning just stopping, getting up, and shuffling away as if nothing had happened. It must have lost the scent. Good on the mole.
For all our enhanced optics, nothing had quite the same impact as the naked eye. To just look through the view port down on our fragile little biosphere. To see the massive ecological devastation makes one understand how the modern environmental movement began with the American space program. There were so many fires, and I don’t just mean the buildings, or the forests, or even the oil rigs blazing out of control-bleeding Saudis actually went ahead and did it-I mean the campfires as well, what had to be at least a billion of them, tiny orange specks covering the Earth where electric lights had once been. Every day, every night, it seemed like the whole planet was burning. We couldn’t even begin to calculate the ash count but we estimated it was equivalent to a low-grade nuclear exchange between the United States and former Soviet Union, and that’s not including the actual nuclear exchange between Iran and Pakistan. We watched and recorded those as well, the flashes and fires that gave me eye spots for days. Nuclear autumn was already beginning to set in, the gray-brown shroud thickening each day.
It was like looking down on an alien planet, or on Earth during the last great mass extinction. Eventually conventional optics became useless in the shroud, leaving us with only thermal or radar sensors. Earth’s natural face vanished behind a caricature of primary colors. It was through one of these systems, the Aster sensor aboard the Terra Satellite, that we saw the Three Gorges Dam collapse.
Roughly ten trillion gallons of water, carrying debris, silt, rocks, trees, cars, houses, and house-sized pieces of the dam itself! It was alive, a brown and white dragon racing to the East China Sea. When I think of the people in its path… trapped in barricaded buildings, unable to escape the tidal wave because of the Zed Heads right outside their doors. No one knows how many people died that night. Even today, they’re still finding bodies.
[One of his skeletal hands balls into a fist, the other presses the “self-medicate” button.]
When I think about how the Chinese leadership tried to explain it all away… Have you ever read a transcript of the Chinese president’s speech? We actually watched the broadcast from a pirated signal off their Sinosat II. He called it an “unforeseen tragedy.” Really? Unforeseen? Was it unforeseen that the dam had been built on an active fault line? Was it unforeseen that the increased weight of a giant reservoir had induced earthquakes in the past and that cracks had already been detected in the foundation months before the dam was completed?
He called it an “unavoidable accident.” Bastard. They had enough troops to wage open warfare in almost every major city, but they couldn’t spare a couple of traffic cops to protect against a catastrophe waiting to happen? No one could imagine the repercussions of abandoning both the seismic warning stations and the emergency spillway controls? And then to try to change their story halfway through, to say that they’d actually done everything they could to protect the dam, that, at the time of the disaster, valiant troops of the PLA had given their lives to defend it. Well, I’d been personally observing Three Gorges for over a year leading up to the disaster and the only PLA soldiers I ever saw had given their lives a long, long time ago. Did they really expect their own people to buy such a blatant lie? Did they really expect anything less than all-out rebellion?
Two weeks after the start of the revolution, we received our first and only signal from the Chinese space station, Yang Liwei. It was the only other manned facility in orbit, but couldn’t compare to such an exquisite masterpiece as ours. It was more of a slapdash job, Shenzhou modules and Long March fuel tanks cobbled together like a giant version of the old American Skylab.
We’d been trying to contact them for months. We weren’t even sure if there was a crew. All we got was a recorded message in perfect Hong Kong English to keep our distance lest we invite a response of “deadly force.” What an insane waste! We could have worked together, traded supplies, technical expertise. Who knows what we could have accomplished if we had only chucked the politics and come together as human bloody beings.
We’d convinced ourselves that the station had never been inhabited at all, that their deadly force warning was just a ruse. We couldn’t have been more surprised when the signal came over our ham radio. It was a live human voice, tired, frightened, and cutting out after only a few seconds. It was all I needed to board the Verne and head over to the Yang.
As soon as it came over the horizon I could tell that its orbit had shifted radically. As I closed the distance, I could see why. Their escape pod had blown its hatch, and because it was still docked to the primary airlock, the entire station had depressurized in seconds. As a precaution, I requested docking clearance. I got nothing. As I came aboard, I could see that even though the station was clearly large enough for a crew of seven or eight, it only had the bunk space and personal kits for two. I found the Yang packed with emergency supplies, enough food, water, and Q2 candles for at least five years. What I couldn’t figure out at first was why. There was no scientific equipment aboard, no intelligence-gathering assets. It was almost like the Chinese government had sent these two men into space for no other purpose than to exist. Fifteen minutes into my floatabout, I found the first of several scuttling charges. This space station was little more than a giant Orbital Denial Vehicle. If those charges were to detonate, the debris from a four-hundred-metric-ton space station would not only be enough to damage or destroy any other orbiting platform, but any future space launch would be grounded for years. It was a “Scorched Space” policy, “if we can’t have it, neither can anyone else.”
All the station’s systems were still operational. There had been no fire, no structural damage, no reason I could see to cause the accident of the escape pod’s hatch. I found the body of a lone taikonaut with his hand still clinging to the hatch release. He was wearing one of their pressurized escape suits, but the faceplate had been shattered by a bullet. I’m guessing the shooter was blown out into space. I’d like to believe that the Chinese revolution wasn’t just restricted to Earth, that the man who’d blown the hatch was also the one who had attempted to signal us. His mate must have stuck by the old guard. Maybe Mister Loyalist had been ordered to set off the scuttling charges. Zhai-that was the name on his personal effects-Zhai had tried to blast his mate into space and had caught a round in the process. Makes for a good tale, I think. That’s how I’m going to remember it.
Is that how you were able to extend your endurance? By using the supplies aboard the Yang?
[He gives me a thumbs-up.] We cannibalized every inch of it for spares and materials. We would have liked to have merged the two platforms together but we didn’t have the tools or manpower for such an undertaking. We might b
een able to use the escape pod to return to Earth. It had a heat shield and room for three. It was very tempting. But the station’s orbit was decaying rapidly, and we had to make a choice then and there, escape to Earth or resupply the ISS. You know which choice we made.
Before we finally abandoned her, we laid our friend Zhai to rest. We strapped his body into its bunk, brought his personal kit back to the ISS, and said a few words in his honor as the Yang burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere. For all we knew he might have been the loyalist, not the rebel, but either way, his actions allowed us to stay alive. Three more years we remained in orbit, three more years that wouldn’t have been possible without the Chinese consumables.
I still think it’s one of the war’s great ironies that our replacement crew-ended up arriving in a privately owned civilian vehicle. Spacecraft Three, the ship originally designed for prewar orbital tourism. The pilot, with his cowboy hat and big, confident Yankee grin. [He tries his best Texas accent.] “Anyone order takeout?” [He laughs, then winces and self-medicates again.]
Sometimes I’m asked if we regretted our decision to stay aboard. I can’t speak for my mates. On their deathbeds they both said they’d do it all over again. How can I disagree? I don’t regret the physical therapy that followed, getting to know my bones again and remembering why the good Lord gave us legs in the first place. I don’t regret being exposed to so much cosmic radiation, all those unprotected EVAs, all that time with inadequate shielding in the ISS. I don’t regret this. [He motions to the hospital room and machinery attached to his body.] We made our choice, and, I’d like to think, we made a difference in the end. Not bad for the son of an Andamooka opal miner.
[Terry Knox died three days after this interview.]
Ancud, Isla Grande de Chiloe, Chile
